To start let me say this an excellent game, perhaps one of the best strategy games I have ever played.
With that said I have encountered a frustrating problem in the game. When it comes to naval battles, most especially when Rocket ships are involved, ships that catch on fire and then surrender will after a period of time continue to burn until they blow up. However, when it comes to the last ship(s) that surrender because they caught on fire, there is a glitch. The game will detect that all enemy ships have either run away, sunk or blown up, or surrendered. Ships that surrender are supposed to either be captured or removed from the game because they were too badly damaged. However, a ship that surrenders because it caught on fire and did not blow up before the end of the battle, will often after the battle escape, virtually undamaged. As you can imagine, this is extremely frustrating. Could this please be fixed.

Short answer nope ETW was abandoned still very badly broken basically a bad beta and NTW wasn`t a whole lot better when it was abandoned your best bet is to look around at the mods out there that will fix your issue as TW have a history of not bothering to sort out any of its games.

For mods, I've heard (but haven't investigated myself) that Darthmod is the best mod out there. So I'd recommend checking out that mod. I've heard it balances the AI out a whole bunch
And yea, honestly it's a shame this game didn't turn out. I had high hopes for it before release. But, the AI's crummy, the sound is crummy (seriously, battle music/sound doesn't sound right, and the campaign music is just boring), and the game mechanics are sloppy (i.e. defending a fort/telling your soldiers to man cannons).
Sorry. Feel a little ranty tonight

Darthmod fixes some stuff but breaks more than it fixes the latest version 5th rate ships demolish 1st rate indeed its not even worth building anything but 5th rate ,Cavalry act more like main battle tanks with the ability to literally smash anything in their path including unshaken infantry squares and artillery is so messed up that about 50% of the time you will inflict no casualties on an enemy less than 50 feet away while firing canister shot and its now possible to miss a 20 foot high 200 foot long wall at less than 400 feet.